


Endless Summer

by YvonatroTRST



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Nature never changes, Summer never ends, To anything insane, To anything romantic, To literature, To music, To my endless summer, To poems
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-13
Updated: 2020-09-13
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:14:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26434759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YvonatroTRST/pseuds/YvonatroTRST
Summary: An endless summer exists forever inside me.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 1





	Endless Summer

Every time, between each trivia that burned me down into pieces, when I glanced at all the books of poems lined in my bookcase, which seemed to sleep there in silence and death forever, I could not stop recalling the remote late summer in the very end of my high school year. To be more specific, it was _our_ high school - Marina and me.

Like many kids that grew up together, Marina and I shared a similar aesthetic. We young girls loved fanatically every detail in summer. Precisely, we were totally into the images of summer drew by poetry, literature, and music. At that time, easily recalling parts of writings from Shakespeare or Byron was our favorite routine. With soft feather-like strokes, they portrayed an incredible paradise, which was always youthful and flourished, swaying in the best Golden Age. Except for words, the lyrics filled with dreamlike summer symbols were also craved in our blood and bones. In the long shining history river of art, many of the sensitive artists bred this season with their indescribable preference. They said it is summer that is the best time to love, to relight the dead flame in your heart. To express yourself when the roller coaster reaches the peak, to hide in the wardrobe when you believe in the tale of lions and witches again. To provoke any absolutes, to cause a youthful commotion. To study the subjects that you cannot make money from, to live in a bohemian life. 

They said summer is a symbol of youth, a street that paved with gold, and a period that we can do anything insane.

“Anything legal,” Marina added.  
“But anything taboo as well,” I added also.

Marina and I fell into this rabbit hole, deeply fascinated with those scenarios, which were always clearly or vaguely portrayed with unbelievable tenderness and fondness. Both of us remembered every part of the normal summer night during our elementary school summer vacation: Marina was lying on my bed, holding a book, and reading a poem by Rachel Sherwood crisply. 

>   
> the color of the sky makes brilliant reflection  
> in the water and oil along the curb  
> deepened aqua and the sharp pure rose of the clouds  
> there is no sun or moon, few stars wheel  
> above the domestic scene — this half-lit world  
> still, quiet calming the dogs worried by distant alarms  
> 

“That’s awesome. ” I sighed in relief.  
“We are forever young in the summer.” She said in a big smile.

In retrospect, the summer of our childhood _did_ coincide with the general appearance of those oil-painting-like images in literature, music, and poetry. At that time, I always haunted through every secret corner of the city with Marina, without any deliberate purpose, just for playfulness. It was forever never too late to knocked her door, grabbed her arm, and went straight to the wild; it was forever the right time for us to throw ourselves into the wonderland, becoming Alice or Dorothy in the fairy tales that few people believe when they say goodbye to their childhood, and blowing off the Queen of Hearts and Auntie Em. 

In the summer evenings, we lay down on the grass, staring at the twinkling stars that contained tons of fantasies of the passersby. We fumbled for the scattered pearls and rhinestones under the rockery, and climbed it up, looking at the blurred lights in the distance. After the heavy rain, watching the accumulated rain “lake” on the ground, we made up thousands of stories of the palace in the stagnant water, wondering what kind of romance between the knights and princesses would happen there. On our way home from school, we enjoyed the aggressive-less breeze coming to kiss our cheek and blowing over a strand mess of shattered hair that did not stay in the horsetail. We enjoyed every fading second of this season, became hurried like we were running out of time, but still had a secret expectation to stay in this moment until the end of the line.

Every time I thought of these scenes, I would like to be buried initiative in those nights for thousands of times. We, not only Marina and I but also all the nonprofessional artists that appreciate all the wonderful or irrational elements inside the season, should still have this season of inhabiting poetry, we should have stepped in the soft soil in sandals and slippers, we should have been sitting in the evening breeze for all night and all night, we should have gone on an adventure in the suburbs of the city, and we should have traveled to the sea. However, all these dreams faded in the rush of the catastrophe of climate change.

Climate change has indeed destroyed the images of “summer”. The high temperature broke these illusions of summer: all of us could no longer pick up the round pebbles on the clear river bottom, we could no longer look for cicadas and wild birds in the woods, and we could no longer fall in love with this beautiful time. Summer became bothering, because everything seemed on fire. The asphalt roads became weak and sticky, the cicadas cried in dying, and ice cream melted into thick syrup in my hand within a few minutes. It was normal that people tended to stop going out except for some invitations and orders that we could not refuse. Our pace was too hurried, avoiding any heat that would destruct each part of our bodies, shuttling back and forth with only the sweat stains leaving on our clothes.

I still remembered one evening after the impression of summer changed dramatically. That day, I had a strong desire for going to the rural country fair, for the goldfishes, fruits candies, and colorful fireworks. On my way, I almost drowned in my raining sweat, but I still kept going because the country fair tied with one of my summer dreams closely. Nevertheless, when I arrived there, I just witnessed a dead market without any bustling or lively senses.

“Everyone is hurried to go home,” they told me, “nobody can bear the blazing summer.”

Air conditioners were the new oxygen of humans. Even if the fluorine leaked from the air conditioners ate away pieces and pieces of the ozone layer, people still could not quit the only tool that can make the unbearable summer better - so did I. Days and nights of summer, sitting in the cool room that blocked any high-temperature waves, I was like frozen in a broken dream.

At the near end of high school, I was hit by a strong fever.

“Heather, the girl who was burning in fever, like to find my summer,” I murmured.

Marina put her hand on my forehead and slightly estimated my temperature. “You didn't have a fever.”

“I didn't.” I showed a weak smile, “The fever exists in my mind.”

It was I who suddenly came out with this ridiculous idea. With the dying bohemian impressions, summer was destroyed. Summer nowadays was no longer summer, the previous romantic elements in my summer poetry were shattered into tedious pieces. I did not know if the children born in the current could understand those poems, which fulfill the symbols of the past days: those sweet melons, mung beans, and morning glory; those shrubs with broken white flowers, and the paths that we could walk barefoot.

At that moment, as the one who watched summer transited from a magnificent cathedral of ancient poems into the defenseless ruins, I wanted to find my summer so fiercely. I was at the end of the high school era, facing the door to the university ahead, countless melancholy grew in my heart. People always say that the high-school-era is youth, having the right to do anything insane, and the college-era is life - everything will no longer be pure and true as it is now.

It is just like summer right now. Everything is no longer pure and pleasant as it was in the past.

“Will you go with me?” I asked gently.

Marina stared at me for a long time. We just dived into this silence, sinking in our memory. 

Suddenly, Marina laughed, “Heather, do you remember those nights? On cool summer nights, we didn't need to turn on the air conditioner. An electric fan near us was happily spinning the blades. We took turns holding books, reading poems about summer aloud, thinking of things that existed between fantasy and reality at the same time.”

“I remember every detail: ripe wild strawberries, cool lakeside, and music fountains; no burning temperature, no floating white garbage on the sea, as well as no artificial lake in the city.”

“So let’s go! ‘ _Rage, rage against the dying of the light_ ’!” she said loudly, “We will find our summer, there’d be no time for getting old when we were young!”

“Dylan Thomas!” I screamed in strong happiness, which almost made me want to cry. “ ‘ _Don’t go gentle into that good night_ ’! ”

That night, the last good night that we went into with gentle, both Marina and I were like to go crazy, for the last time, for the end of our dream. It was almost an extremely normal holiday's midnight, at the time that absolutely inappropriate to travel, we went to the lake closest to home without hesitation. The current summer heat made people sweat like rain, but we seemed to be on the nights of many years ago. On our way there, we immersed ourselves in the previous summer nights. We were like to travel back through one whole decade, wandering the street with rubber sandals, taking turns to bite the chocolate ice cream holding in my hand, sharing the same cheap earphones, and listening to the Beatles or X-Japan songs singing inside. Those nights that the moon would light the whole world with fond silver, the sea would wash away any depressive mood on the land. Like Will Smith sang in the 1990s, “ _Summer, summer, summertime / Time to kick back and unwind_.”

Marina and I walked through the green grass, feeling the leaves kissing our calf, and flying insects circling around our ankles. We stood by the lake, speechless for a long time.

I forgot everything: I forgot the shining lights in the distance, the severe heat that made me hard to breathe, and almost how time flew away. Just memories, just dreams, just the old lullabies sang by this season. Nothing bothering exists anymore, neither did we. In the silence, Marina and I looked at each other and smiled. That was a depressed but relieved smile - we were totally painted with both hilarity and blue. We held hands tightly, laughed in dense happiness and sadness, and jumped into the cool lake together. 

When I fell into the cool water, my summer came back. The summer that paved with ridiculous courage, the summer that lost its color in layers of lights and heatwaves, the summer that only existed in poems now. 

We were so impulsive. We were so summer-made.

“To do anything,” I cried when babbles rushed out of my mouth like blood, “Because _**SUMMER NEVER ENDS**_!”

It was ready for sunrise. Marina and I went home with wet clothes, or, in my mind, the last kiss that my gentle summer night left me. Subsequently, I got caught by a real fever. I was almost never willing to open my eyes again, maybe Marina died in the lack with me also. Lying in bed with the heat that almost the same with the temperature outside my windows, everything rewound, and I seemed to go back to that rabbit hole again. Marina and I, two crazy girls of fantasy and romance, we were Alice and Dorothy, chasing a nonexistent wonderland.

It was the dumbest thing we ever did.


End file.
